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'We laid a track for the tail, another for head movement, one for the teeth and a bunch of other functions. 'We can record and play back movement,' Conti says. The attack sharks were not neutrally buoyant-(the 12-foot-long attack hammerhead weighed 1100 pounds, making this nearly impossible)-so they were either attached by wire to a crane and put in the water, or mounted on rigs that could launch the sharks forward at 30 mph. You're trying to create, through technology, intent and decisiveness and powerful movements.' Unlike the swimmer, the attack sharks were hydraulically powered, connected by umbilical cords to 5000-psi cylinders. 'The thing that gives animatronics life is the feeling that these animals are thinking, or doing something intentionally. 'It kills me when mechanical effects are slow, or repetitive,' Conti says. are kind of big, expensive toys.'Д¬onti created attack models for both the great white and the hammerhead, which had to be more powerful than the swimmer. 'They're customized,' Conti says, 'but you're basically pushing a joystick around like you would an RC car.

It's like an aircraft.' Two divers with waterproof joysticks controlled the sharks in real time. 'So you have to make out of incredibly light materials, like aluminum and titanium.

'Everything you're putting inside the shark heavier than water-the rubber, the motors-wants to make it sink,' Conti says. 'There's a tiny little tether, but it's all electrically powered with servos.' The biggest challenge was making sure the animatronic shark was neutrally buoyant, like a real shark, and was balanced correctly so it hovered in the water as a real shark would. 'The Swimmer is a self-contained model that swims literally on its own,' Conti says. The swimming model for the great white is a hulking, 9-foot-long, 600-pound 200-hp robot. 'We split those two behaviors into two different types of models, and optimized each to do one of those things best.' 'Sharks are this total contrast of stealthy, cruising lurking and these intense bursts of power,' Conti says. He built two different models of shark, a 'swimmer' and an 'attacker,' each of which required very different internal mechanisms. Next, Conti slit the bellies of the rubber skins so he could insert the internal robotics that power the sharks. When the material dried, it became the sharks' skins, which the team then painted using the photos as a reference. Conti poured urethane rubber into the mold. Artists made a sculpture of the shark based on the size of the jaw, then created a mold from the sculpture. To ground the anatomy in reality, Conti's team started with a real set of jaws from each shark. And sometimes you get these happy accidents-like the animatronic will knock a spear out of an actor's hand, and we'll rewrite the sequence to include that.'Д¬onti began by looking at hundreds of photos of great whites and hammerheads. And with animatronics, the big advantage is that if you think of the shark as a character and the actors as characters, then you have all the characters on stage and can direct them at the same time. But the great white and hammerhead were more hand-to-hand. 'Those tended to be visual effects, because you can choreograph exactly what you want. 'In a lot of the other attacks in the film, the sharks come out of nowhere, grab the character and they're gone,' Conti says. While most of them were created using visual effects, director David Ellis knew he wanted animatronics for the two drawn-out attack sequences, in which the actors try to fend off a hammerhead and a great white. There are six different types of sharks-including cookie-cutters, makos, and bulls-in Shark Night. From an engineering standpoint, they're a completely different level of power.' They both have four wheels and engines, but the animatronics we create today are highly tuned machines. 'It's like comparing a Model T to a Ferrari. 'People bring up Jaws all the time,' he says. But Spielberg's 1970s icon can't compare to the technology behind today's Hollywood predators.

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Walt Conti-whose company Edge Innovations has created robot creatures for Free Willy, Deep Blue Sea and now Shark Night 3D, out Sept. Any filmmaker tasked with creating realistic marine predators has to measure up to a larger-than-life specter lurking just beneath the waves: Steven Spielberg's iconic animatronic shark, Jaws.